“I’m in earnest,” said Marvin, sternly. “That’s what most men would do.”
“Oh no, they wouldn’t,” said Harshaw, cavalierly.
“Why wouldn’t they?” demanded Marvin, his curiosity aroused by this strange indifference.
“Because these fellows I was hunting with will be sure to find this place, and they would know I wouldn’t go fall off a bluff of my own accord, after such a good supper as I had here, and such a good bed. They wouldn’t know I wasn’t allowed to sleep in it, though, on account of a long-jawed couple like you two.”
He looked the picture of unconcern,—as if he had not really credited their words.
“They couldn’t track ye hyar,” argued Jeb; “ground too dry in the evening fur yer critter’s huffs to make enny mark.”
“Bless your bones!” cried Harshaw, contemptuously, “I broke a path nigh a yard wide in the brush, and I blazed every oak-tree I met with my hunting-knife,—look and see how hacked it is,—and I cut my name on the first beech I came across. Think I was going to get lost in this wilderness without leaving any way for my friends to find me? They know pretty well where they left me. As soon as it’s light enough they’ll be on my track.”
He lied seldom, but with startling effect. The verisimilitude of his invention, which had flashed upon him at the last moment, carried conviction. The other two men looked at each other in consternation.
This they thought was the secret of his ease of mind. This was the reason that he was willing to abide with them as long as they listed. These mysterious friends, these lurking hunters, might materialize at any moment when day should fairly dawn. The moonshiners asked with eager curiosity the names of the party. Marvin knew none of them, for it was a new region to him, and his vocation restricted his social opportunities. He had sprung up from the bed, and stood holding his ragged beard with one hand, and gazing with perplexed eyes at the recumbent lawyer. The frightful deed that he and his confederates had contemplated, that had seemed their only safe recourse,—to fling the intruder over a precipice, and to leave his mare grazing near, as if in his search he had fallen,—had a predestined discovery through the craft of the man who had marked the devious trail of his footsteps to their door. The moonshiner trembled, as he stood so near this pitfall into which he had almost stumbled.